Dear Fellow Believers, 

This was our first night of Grace Cafe. Hell, it was our first day, ever, on the radio. I was astounded to hear this again—to hear how confident and together we all sound. Like we know what we're doing or something. In the Scriptures, we certainly did know what we were doing. But radio? We were winging it.

The confidence I am exuding on this opening program—it jumps out of the ether into my earphones as I sit on my sofa listening to this again after twenty-five years—it's a God thing. Just an hour before this show, I was on the way to Cleveland from Greenwich, OH with my wife Marcia, telling her, "Do you know what I really want to do right now? I just really want to turn around and go home and do a private Bible study with you on the sofa. I'm not up to this." I believe we both prayed to God for help.

And help us He did. Once we got to the station and our producer Ricardo Johnson gave us the signal, I started talking and they couldn't shut me up. No one has been able to shut me up since. So strange to say this of a guy who stuttered his whole life. And yet God made me for this.

It is bittersweet hearing and seeing Charlie Cronk, as he has been dead now for ten years. When we first met, he saw something in me and I in him. We were both men after God's own heart. Never has a truer heart beat for God than the heart of Charlie Cronk.

Mike and Denise Telep have refused to talk to me for the same decade—and I have no idea why. I hear through the grapevine that they don't even believe in a personal God anymore.

Ted McDivitt, a guy with whom I drove to many conferences in Michigan, Ohio, and South Carolina, eventually got tricked into Open Theism, and therefore no longer believes that God is in control of everything. In fact, God's not really in control of anything. Yet somehow He's still going to be all in all. One of the damndest things I've ever heard.  

What happened to Ken Pridemore, I don't know. He had a Moses beard. He had been through some harrowing stuff in the Vietnam War, but he was a true-blue believer. Whether he still is or not, I don't know.

The things that have chanced since this recording are appalling. (I haven't even talked about divorce—and I won't.) But one thing does not change, and it is this: my passion for God and His Word. It is the same today as it was the summer of '99. God has been continually faithful to me and to His calling of me in spite of the devastating rolls of the waves of time.  

Thank you, Rodney Paris, for putting this together. Rodney has got all the other tapes as well, and so you haven't heard the last of Grace Cafe.  

Thanks to all of you for loving me and supporting this work for so many years. I love all of you and could not do what I do without you.

Yours from the peninsula, with appreciation,

Martin